For quite some time, people have been persistently talking about the postmedial condition of art, a kind of improvement of the specificity of the medium in which a production of meaning circumscribed to a particular medium is no longer necessarily but rather, there is a digression in contemporary forms of artistic production. However, the mere fact of thinking about a post-medium is coming back to us as in a kind of double bind for the characteristics of the media that allow us to identify art as such. A double bind in the sense that there are two demands in conflict, each one of them in its own and different logical level, considering that none of them can be ignored. Therefore, and although there is no longer a specific condition of the media, the issue is far from closing.

Now, from my perspective, rather than a postmedial condition, we could speak, to some extent, of works that have been placed within the limits of the artistic media, or certain practices that insistently continue being a burden. This is not to restore them, but rather to think about how it is that once they were possible in the past. Artists who insist, however, that exploring the media despite their crisis, still makes some sense. Painting, sculpture, drawing and photography can fall into an organic and codependent relationship if they are taken to the limit of their own specific conditions, which, far from being real, they are based on modern myths. In such way, a sculpture can be made from a painting if color is no longer acknowledged, but rather it is considered as the accumulated pictorial matter, or even the superficiality of the pictorial level can be questioned as a surface if it is violently altered in the action of adding and removing paint successively. In this sense, the artistic condition of the medium becomes tense, no longer towards the inner meaning but rather toward the superficial exteriority in the object-image relation.

The exhibition titled Double-bind shows the tensions of the media in contemporary art through three artists - Mateo Cohen, Marie Rief and Bernardo Montoya - who, in their own way, question the duality expressed in the depth-surface relation and if it is possible to preserve it after all.
Firstly, Marie Rief's works are “superficial windows” in the sense that the drawing that is added makes one notice that the representation of depth is just that: a representation. In this case, the works of Rief may question the photographic effect because the drawing that is added brings the superficial light, of which a photograph is constituted, back to the paper. However, there is still a trace of that depth as a footprint.
In the case of Mateo Cohen, the fact that the surface appears as the “work” of the medium in each painting, is what is considered substantial. The action of the painting of this artist is more related with the “limit” of the painting rather than with the representation or even with the surface. By transferring the pictorial matter as a kind of template from one canvas to another, the superficial footprints of the previous medium that remain there as residue become evident. Cohen is neither interested in the surface as a content nor in what is beyond the painting as space. However, his practice lies on the edge between those three things. The color in his paintings works as the evidence of the pictorial space as a limit.
On the other hand, Bernardo Montoya executes the opposite process. How is it possible that painting is so superficial that it becomes volume? In this case the color is substantial not only because of the superficial coating, but because of the same relationship (the old Aristotelian dispute) between form and matter. The works of Montoya are not paintings, but it is the color that acquires a volumetric condition as matter.
Due to these facts, the exhibition Double Bind is a point and a questioning about the modern condition of art and its foundations. It is an exhibition about art and its material contradictions.
Daniel Montero

It was 1979 when anthropologist Walter F. Morris Jr. published A catalog of textiles and
folkart of Chiapas, an extensive inventory of three fabric collections, patterns and other
regional objects. In this self-edited volume black&white, almost abstract images, which
reduce the cataloged artifacts to a series of contrasting planes, appear along with greatly
detailed descriptive texts.
Few Augusts ago,on a cloudy day, a copy of the book fell into the hands of Rometti Costales,
who could not keep from intervening in some way.Through dissembling, quartering,
and reordering the content, they edit images and modify descriptions, overshadowing
the language and bringing it closer to veiled photographs. The result is the facsimile Blue
has run, a weird compendium of image and word, which converts into a ready to act
contraption.
Rumpite libros ne corda vestra rumpantur (Break the books before they break your hearts )
chants an alchemical dictum.
From this facsimile emerges an ensemble of loose phrases without ostensible meaning,
which are the raw material of this project.These are subtractions of subtractions, words
losing their original function and not describing the world anymore. Now they are free to do
what they want.
And under certain circumstances, as J.L.Austin stated, they are capable to create reality,
to act beyond the language. Thus, the performative elocution arises. These eighty phrases
are hence a starting point, a preamble. It’s on the edge, a spell of initiation , revealing a
previously inexistent reality -or that which we were not able to see-. Out of each one’s
autonomy emerges a new oeuvre, which, beyond illustrating the words, gives shape to works.
The signs together with other components constitute the material part of each work. They
form a bridge between the palpable and the impalpable. Movements, forms and trajectories;
bronze, wax, cement, and palm. If usually the title of an artwork comes into existence after
the artwork itself -describes, complements, plays around- , here the phrases are titles of
something that potentially exists, and at the same time are integral part of that something.
Bronze gazes and concrete bites observe us from the walls; crimped palm leaf lovers lie
down on the floor; traces of frozen gold trajectories engraved on paper; columns of wax
and concrete support the firmament; signs scraped over desert varnish observe us while we
observe them. In the same way as the words eliminate themselves provoking the rise of the
void on a page, matter is handled through a collage, performing incisions, subtractions, and
juxtapositions of elements of diverse nature. The works emerge from incantation and reunite
in space shaping an aleatory stage. Its origin as a descriptive language in anthropological
context, as an attempt to collect and explain a piece of the world, makes way for the
uncertain, sliding doubt from possibility - and necessity- to order and understand everything
around us. In this way these craft objects from Chiapas establish relations with other ones,
which are materialising themselves now, drawing an extraneous meditative space between
them, and allowing words, materials, gestures or time shape the unknown.
Juan Canela
Blue has Run is an modified facsimile of A catalog of textiles and folkart of Chiapa, which originally
was printed in 100 copies , most of were lost or dispersed through various specialized libraries. The
catalogue lists elements from three collections of patterns from south Mexico, created with help of
Walter F. Morris in the middle sixties. The DIY quality and meticulously precise descriptions take
the content of the catalogue to areas closer to poetry, moving it away from its original purpose. The
publication followed the exhibition Azul Jacinto Marino at Center of Contemporary Art Synagogue of
Delme.
** In 1962 English philosopher and semiologist J.L. Austin published How to Do Things with Words, in
which he proposes the concept of performative utterance, a form of expression where the words enact
rather than describe. Austin, J. L:How to Do Things with Words, second edition, ed. Marina Sbisa and
J.O.Urmson, Cambridge : William James Lectures, 1975

For Compression Loss Troika will premiere two new bodies of work alongside existing sculptures and installations. The works in the exhibition stem from Troika’s continuing interest in the various models and belief systems used to detail and understand the world. Incorporating the opposing frameworks of technological advancement and mythology, Troika’s works investigate how the application of a purely rational and scientific method onto practical life is often at odds with the subjective and unpredictable.

Giving the exhibition its title, Compression Loss is a new series of sculptures in which Troika take mythological figures and forms and deconstruct them into separate ‘slices’. The title references a method of rationalisation in which the whole is seemingly understood by its deconstruction into smaller, separate parts — a process which does not account for accumulative significance. By physically slicing reproductions of Egyptian deity Thoth, Aztec deity Xipe, Greek goddess Hebe and Roman goddess Venus, Troika’s sculptures usurp this linear, reductionist viewpoint of knowledge, replacing it with a fragmented oscillatory one. Utilising methods of analogue ‘slicing’ they juxtapose the objective, logical applications of science with the shifting nature of mythology and belief.

While Compression Loss interrogates a grown history, Troika’s series of tapestries A Labyrinth of a straight line operate on the certainty of algorithmic data. The work takes its starting point from a recursive algorithm which is commonly used to search and navigate large amounts of data — a computing process which Troika have translated and reenacted on a human scale. Rendered in copper tape typically used in electronics for conductive circuits, as the algorithm traverses the expanse of canvas it manifests as a maze. Its path can be traced as one single, continuous line which closes into an infinite loop. The maze structure, an ancient signification of confusion and uncertainty, choice and resolution, was here created by following simple algorithmic rules. In A Labyrinth of a straight line the repetition of these rules results in an increasing absence of complexity, stripping the maze of its original symbolism.

Shown alongside the new works are All Colours White (2017), a structure on which a projected array of colours merges into white light every twelve minutes, Testing Time (2014), a digitally manipulated stream of water and The Sum of All Possibilities (2014), a suspended sculpture that continually reconfigures itself. Shown collectively, the works in the exhibition either incorporate or reference technological processes as a means to investigate the coexistence of seemingly irreconcilable opposites and the plurality of knowledge and experience.

PROYECTOSMONCLOVA is pleased to announce the opening of CLOUDS AND TEARS by Michael Sailstorfer (Velden/Vils, Germany, 1979). The exhibition brings together works in sculpture, video, and site specific intervention that expound upon the artist’s penchant for finding poesy in praxis.

In his first solo presentation in Mexico City, Sailstorfer plays with refuse of the Anthropocene to poetically compose a metaphysical universe which examines consciousness, time, rebirth and wear. Through durational and object-based works he suggests the possibility of a new metaphysical order in which humans’ being is not necessarily exclusively privileged.

The Russian collective Chto Delat (What to do?) Is conceived as a self-organized platform for a variety of cultural activities with the intention of politicizing the production of knowledge. When we thought we had all the answers, life changed the questions is a tour of the wide range of media that make up his artistic production, from plays and video, to radio programs and murals; including art projects, seminars, public campaigns, newspapers and educational platforms. It is also a journey through the questions that move their practice, all variants of the one that names them What to do ?, and the answer they have found so far to navigate in the dark: propagate models of activist self-education that reconnect political action , committed thinking and artistic innovation.

The works deal with the recent past, the present and even possible futures, with staging that generate aesthetic experiments in which the possibilities of socially and politically committed art - as a reality and its own dimension - are proven to operate under extreme conditions. A remote island in the northern hemisphere, a country in a state of emergency at the threshold of the war or a country that has completely prohibited and criminalized immigrants, are some of the scenarios in which key figures of contemporary emergence: the protester solitary, artists become political refugees, the excluded, the unfortunate hero, etc. All possible alter egos of the members of Chto Delat who ask the question: when the community is necessary to fight, and when is it simply necessary to survive? As we normalize the global instauration of dark times and our intellectual constructs often prove to be inoperative, Chto Delat insists on producing new languages ​​that can organize pessimism in a way that makes possible the appearance of light, because (in his own words) : artists must strive to convince their audience that there is more than shit ...

The group Chto Delat was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, with the aim of merging political theory, art and activism. The group was constituted in an action called “The refoundation of St. Petersburg”. Shortly after, the original nucleus, still without name, began to publish an international newspaper called Chto Delat. The name of the group derives from the novel of the Russian writer of the 19th century Nikolai Chernyshevsky and immediately recalls the first socialist self-organizations of workers in Russia, which Lenin updated in his own publication, “What to do?” (1902).

In 2013, Chto Delat started an educational platform: the School of Committed Art in St. Petersburg and also runs a space called The Rose House of Culture. Since its creation, the group publishes an Anglo-Russian newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural policy, in dialogue with the international context.

The works of the collective are characterized by the use of the alienation effect, the surrealist scenography, the typicity and consistently by case studies of concrete social and political struggles. The aesthetics of the group is based on the heretical display of the artistic devices offered by Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luck Godard and Reiner Fassbinder.